An accessible Jekyll theme for research websites.

Important

This repository is under construction and active development.

Axya is a Jekyll theme that helps researchers quickly publish accessible, clean, and modern companion sites for their papers, posters, and projects. Most Jekyll themes overlook accessibility—this one aims for:

• WCAG 2.1 AAA compliance
• Screen‑reader‑friendly semantics
• Full keyboard navigation support
• High color contrast and readability
• Minimal cognitive load
• Solid mobile navigation experience

Axya in the wild:

• Systems for Scaling Accessibility Efforts in Large Computing Courses
• Nonvisual Support for Understanding and Reasoning about Data Structures
• Harvard HCI Reading Group
• Web Impact UW

Features

• Accessible layouts for research websites
• Homepage with hero section + automatic page grid
• Clean typography
• Configurable metadata:
  • Conference name & year
  • Authors
  • Affiliation details
  • Research links (PDF, DOI, supplemental, etc.)
• Fully responsive

Installation

1. Using as a Remote Theme (GitHub Pages compatible)

First, follow the usage for jekyll-remote-theme.

Then, add this to your _config.yml:

remote_theme: ritesh-kanchi/axya@main

Then run:

bundle exec jekyll serve

Warning

jekyll-remote-theme has its own problems, and may not work out of the box. Including the following gems may help:

gem 'csv'
gem 'base64'
gem 'bigdecimal'

gem "jekyll", "4.3.3"
gem "jekyll-remote-theme", "~> 0.4.3"

2. Installing the Gem Locally

Build the gem:

gem build axya.gemspec

Install it:

gem install ./axya-0.0.2.gem

Then in your site’s Gemfile:

gem "axya"

And in _config.yml:

theme: axya

Usage

The theme currently provides these layouts:

• base — base layout with header and footer
• home — homepage with hero section and automatic page grid
• page — simple general‑purpose page layout

More layouts will come as the theme evolves.

Configuration

Add the following fields to your _config.yml to customize your research site:

title: Research Title
description: An accompanying website for a research paper.

conference:
  name: Conference Name
  year: 2026

content:
  footer: Your Name
  affiliation:
    name: University Name
    department: Department Name
    url: https://example.com # (optional)
  type: Paper
  authors:
    - name: First Author
      url: https://example.com # (optional)
      img: /path/to/author-image.jpg # (optional)
    - name: Second Author
      url: https://example.com # (optional)
      img: /path/to/author-image.jpg # (optional)
  links:
    - label: Paper Link
      url: https://doi.org/10.1145/XXXXXXX.XXXXXXX

Add as many authors or links as needed.

Front Matter Configuration

---
layout: page
title: Page Title
description: A brief description of the page. # (optional)
hide: true # Whether to hide the page from navigation. (optional)
order: 1 # Order of the page in navigation. (optional, lower is higher priority)
---

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/ritesh-kanchi/axya. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

I appreciate any feedback or suggestions for improvements!

License

This theme is open source under the MIT License.

AI Positionality

This repository makes use of GitHub Copilot in reviewing contributions to PRs. Changes made directly by GitHub Copilot are not made without direct intervention, and are for simple changes (i.e., README formatting) over full code and feature merges.

Where does Axya come from?

A riff on "A11y" (if you can imagine the "x" being two crossed 1's.)